


Freefall

by t34lbloods (perculious)



Series: A6A4 [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Frottage, LOMAX, M/M, Minor Injuries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-11
Updated: 2013-01-11
Packaged: 2017-11-25 02:00:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/633912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perculious/pseuds/t34lbloods
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I guess I always thought there was a little bit more to tomb raiding than this,” Jake said, following noisily behind Dirk and kicking at a stray pebble. “You know. I’m not asking for anything too fancy but the occasional pit full of snakes would be awfully nice. Some flair.”</p><p>(sequel to <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/564344">Inkstick</a>)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Freefall

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place about two weeks after [Inkstick](http://archiveofourown.org/works/564344). Thanks to sfingella for the beta. And as always, feel free to hit me up on my Homestuck tumblr (t34lbloods).

“I guess I always thought there was a little bit more to tomb raiding than this,” Jake said, following noisily behind Dirk and kicking at a stray pebble. “You know. I’m not asking for anything too fancy but the occasional pit full of snakes would be awfully nice. Some flair.”

“Dead snakes,” Dirk said. “Everything here is dead.”

“Dead zombie skeleton snakes would be better than just endless dadblasted stone corridors.”

Dirk didn’t answer. Jake kicked another pebble.

The rhythm of life on LOMAX was all off. It swung from life-threatening danger to ennui and back again too quickly to catch the turning point before it happened. They were always working their way downwards, sometimes spending days underground, testing the air every hour to make sure they weren't running into one of the xenon pockets that sometimes cropped up on the lower levels. Days with nothing, no grist and no monsters, and then everything all at once.

"Dadblasted," Dirk said slowly. "Really, Jake?"

"Oh, shut it." Jake shoved his shoulder, and Dirk shoved him back. Jake grinned, and Dirk's insides knotted.

Was this what it was supposed to feel like, Dirk wanted to know. Was this what all those movies were trying to get across, the ones he watched on his flickering computer screen late into the night, trying to catalogue all the different ways people touched each other. The casual hand on the elbow, the arm across the shoulder, the feet tapping together when pressed side by side. 

Dirk had known, all those years, that if he ever wanted to be with Jake and Jane in person, he needed to be able to pretend that he was raised in a culture that disappeared off the face of the earth four hundred years before his birth. So he catalogued acceptable human interactions and filed them away like little gems. Tried to take things he felt and slot them into categories provided by twenty-first century movies and books, so his friends would understand him.

So was this really what all those godawful romantic movies that Jake liked were trying to convey? Because if so, they did a really fucking shit job of it. Dirk had never even imagined anything like this hot, desperate, grasping, _possessive_ feeling that made his throat constrict every time Jake looked at him.

It didn’t feel like he wanted to stargaze with Jake and hold hands while they looked into each other’s eyes. He didn’t want to make Jake a gourmet dinner with roses and candles and shit. He wanted to squeeze Jake so tightly it hurt them both. To trap him somewhere he could never get out so Dirk could breathe easy again. To kiss Jake so hard he could feel still feel the echo of it on his skin an hour later. To wrap his hands around Jake’s throat.

It was a little better now that Jake would touch him. Not all the time, but whatever godawful stifling significance had built up around their first touch was gone now that Dirk had had his hands all over Jake’s arm. Now Jake wouldn’t hesitate to catch his wrist to pull him back from sudden danger, or sling an arm around his shoulder in satisfaction at the end of the day. Dirk was trying to be comfortable too, but he couldn’t help feeling that every touch he gave Jake was uncomfortably loaded. Like somehow he would fuck up the rhythm, drag his fingers for a millisecond too long over Jake’s shoulder and things would get weird between them.

Things were already weird for Dirk. The need to touch Jake was making his skin itch from the inside.

"Want to strife?" Jake was still grinning. It was their sixth hour exploring this mound, and Jake got stir-crazy fast. He was used to the jungle. In some kind of sick parody of his name and mannerisms, Jake's land looked more like the British countryside.

Dirk considered it for a second. "Yeah," he said, pulling out his sword from his specibus. "I could go for that."

It went on for an hour, both of them full of too much pent-up energy from their slow walking pace. Jake hit Dirk in the mouth once with the butt of his pistol, left a bruise on his collarbone from a rough hold, and at one point even tore out a few strands of Dirk's hair. Dirk wanted to ask who taught him to fight so dirty, but he knew the answer.

Finally, Dirk had Jake pinned, holding him to the ground with a knee digging into his hipbone and a sword edge pressed into the soft skin right under his chin. Jake made a convulsive noise, like he was trying to keep himself from swallowing, unwilling to test Dirk’s blade against his skin.

"Give?" Dirk said. Jake's expression was wild and delighted, his eyes wide and bright, like he could ask for nothing more than to have Dirk's sword against his throat all day. Dirk swallowed, trying to physically push back the thoughts that gave him.

"Give," Jake conceded. Dirk climbed off him, and Jake scrambled to his feet. "Whoa," he said, swaying a little, and put a hand against the hard clay wall. Then he laughed. "I feel loads better. Thanks, bro."

"No problem," Dirk said. He unequipped his sword and took a step back, letting Jake recover. Dirk himself was still breathing hard, the rush still making his pulse throb.

Jake looked up at him. His face was half-shaded by his bangs, and Dirk couldn't quite read his expression. Despite his words, it looked like he still wanted more, like his jungle kid energy reserves were boundless and he would happily wear Dirk into the ground with harmless strifes between friends until they had no more strength to run from the monsters. 

Dirk saw Jake move and reacted lightning quick, with reflexes he'd been training since the second he was old enough to hold a sword. He caught Jake's wrist as it lashed out toward him and twisted it upward, giving Jake a hard look that he knew was completely lost behind his shades.

Jake snorted, and then yanked on the wrist that Dirk was holding. Dirk fell a few steps forward, and Jake brought his other arm around and wrapped it around Dirk's back, holding him against his chest.

It was so unexpected that Dirk almost shuddered, like it was something repulsive. The hint of a shiver crept from his neck all the way down his spine, and he hoped to god that it was too slight for Jake to feel. He took a step in closer and dropped Jake's wrist, and Jake wrapped that arm around him too, pulling him deeper into the embrace and fitting his chin over Dirk's shoulder. Dirk could feel Jake's chest still rising and falling abnormally fast from the strife.

"You're supposed to hug back," Jake said, so close that Dirk can feel his hot breath on his ear. Why, Dirk wanted to say, but it would ruin it. Jake would drop him, and that couldn't happen. Dirk wrapped his arms around Jake's waist, keeping them loose, afraid to hold him. He was almost cold with how badly he wanted this to continue, with how terrifying it was not to know when he would get to touch Jake this close again.

"You're such a fucking weirdo," Dirk said in a low voice. Jake put his face against the skin of Dirk's neck and Dirk could feel his mouth turn up in a smile. He would never, ever understand what went through this kid's head.

 _Romantic_ , AR commented. _Next time you should dip his pigtails in the inkwell._

 _I'm trying to get hugged like a fucking human here,_ Dirk told him. _Fuck off._

_Newsflash. Most people don't have to try to act like a human._

_Like you'd know what most people do._

Jake's arms squeezed a little tighter around him and then slackened. Dirk recognized the cue to let go and stepped back again.

"You good now?" Dirk said, ignoring the erratic skipping of his pulse, the way all the strength and power he'd felt during the strife seemed to have dwindled away and left him weak-kneed and shaky.

"Yes, actually," Jake said. "Now come on, let's go find treasure."

 _I know exactly what most people do,_ AR informed Dirk. _Humanity is an open fuckin’ book to me. You really think brains are complicated? You think I don't have that shit on lock? Typical bio-organic hubris._

 _You know you're only this fucking smug because you got it from me, right,_ Dirk thought at him, and followed Jake.

-

They spent the rest of the day in the burial mound. Fucking nothing. Another big zero to pencil onto the chart of how they were spending their big heroic adventure. Sometimes it was enough to make Dirk miss his apartment. At least there he had shit to do, even if he had to make up all his own challenges.

Jake didn't touch him again. Dirk felt oddly drained, like the strain of dealing with being held so fucking briefly was just too much. Pathetic. He knew that. He didn't need AR to tell him.

As it grew later, it became clear that they were going to have to sleep underground. Jake pulled out his husktop, and they picked a movie from his extensive collection. They curled up against one of the cave walls, Dirk with his knees hugged into his chest and Jake cross-legged, and watched it together, the flickering light making the burial maze look the brightest it had all day. Halfway through Jake rested his elbow on Dirk's knee, and Dirk missed every word of the rest of the movie.

In the morning, they packed their shit up and kept going. 

Around noon, they finally reached a cavern that was brimming with grist, little blue and green shapes tucked away in every corner. It was more grist than they’d seen in days, but Dirk privately thought that with the way they'd been using grist up lately, it wasn't much for a multi-day expedition. They quickly gathered it up, and Jake notified the girls on his skulltop, the glow of the flashing lights making the cave look like LOMAX's hottest night club.

"Now what?" Dirk said when Jake had captchalogued the computer and stopped looking like a particularly tacky Halloween decoration. "You want to turn back, or keep going?" He gestured at the tunnel leading further down from the grist cavern.

"I never turn back if I can help it," Jake said in the kind of voice that made Dirk certain he was hearing this line quoted in a trailer in his mind. "Onward ho!"

Within an hour or so, it became apparent that the dirt floors were sloping upwards, which meant that either they were discovering another way out or things were about to get really weird. Arbitrarily difficult game features tended to announce themselves before they happened; changes in the landscape or things not quite making sense were red flags. Dirk made Jake stop, stealing a moment with his hand on Jake’s shoulder while he squinted at the miniature mass spectrometer he’d captchalogued back at Jake’s house, looking for xenon. Every once in a while the game allowed for something so mindbendingly useful that you started thinking you could win after all, and this little alchemized beauty was one of those things. Even if he’d had to throw some SBaHJ in there to get it to alchemize correctly, so the edges were a little fuzzy with compression.

The air checked out, so they continued upward. The air was beginning to lighten, the oppressive darkness of the burial mound starting to fade. Going up, then. Awesome. Dirk did not feel like spending another few days down here.

The floors began to slope more sharply, and after a few minutes Dirk could hear Jake’s breathing rate increase, just a fraction. It made the hairs on his arm stand up. He was hyperaware of every noise Jake made, every slight huff of exertion or faint swallow.

They worked their way upward for another few hours, pausing every once in a while to catch their breath or get something to eat. Finally, they turned a corner and Dirk saw two things at once. The first was the glow of daylight and the welcome sight of green grass outside the exit to the mound. The second was the giant six-legged skeleton monster in the way.

Jake already had his pistols out when Dirk turned his head to look at him, and Dirk equipped his sword in a flash. Jake gave him a look, and Dirk nodded. They’d mostly given up on killing these creatures by now, once they figured out they could find more grist by exploring, but this one was between them and the exit. Their only option was to reduce it to a smoldering pile of candy-like jewels. Dirk took a second to turn off the autoresponder—he didn’t need that shit during a strife.

The creature opened its mouth with a horrible creaking noise that made Dirk wince. They shouldn’t be able to make noise—they had no vocal chords or voiceboxes or air pouches to inflate. They were just clean white bones. They couldn’t really roar, but they could manage a creaky sigh, like a rusting door hinge. It set Dirk’s teeth on edge.

Jake’s pistol shots rang out next to Dirk, and the creature’s jaw opened even wider. Jake was aiming straight up into its mouth, which would be a great strategy if it had skin or blood or a brain. Jake was still convinced that a hulking mass of bleached white bones had a vulnerable spot. He was doing this dumbass gun-tilt, holding both pistols sideways because he thought it looked cool, and squinting one eye to aim even though his aim was fine anyway, just because he wanted to look like a hardass. He was so fucking dumb and Dirk ached over it. Okay. Not the time.

Another blast of Jake’s gun right next to Dirk’s ear left him momentarily disoriented, with a sudden rush of white noise in his eardrum. Jake had shot upward, into the thing’s jaw, and the blast against the inside of its skull snapped its head back with a sickening crunch. Dirk dove forward, keenly aware of how fucking stupid it looked when his sword connected with the thing’s massive rib cage and skidded along the surface with a sickening scrape. He hated fighting these things, because the bones were harder than his sword, so it felt like trying to cut stone with a butter knife. But theoretically any hit was doing damage, even if it made him feel like an idiot. Jake was so fucking lucky he’d picked a weapon with a higher rate of acceleration.

Dirk sliced at the thing’s ribs anyway, nestled between its front legs. He could hear Jake reloading, and then another steady stream of shots. They weren’t that bad, these things, as long as you kept your eye on them, but they took forever to kill. And there was a lot of damage that a giant, clumsy monster could do as the points seeped out of its health bar like an ocean being emptied through a crack in a wall.

Dirk moved in the direction of the tail, staying underneath the creature and hacking at its back fibulas. Maybe attacking the weaker bones would deplete its health bar faster, even if the visible damage was the same, i.e., none. Its thick bones arched over his head like the buttresses of a particularly macabre cathedral. Jake was still aggressing the monster to its face, emptying clip after clip into its enormous skull bones. It was snapping at him now, thrusting its head forward on its neck like a deranged chicken and pushing its knife-sharp teeth into Jake’s face. He was shooting strategically to push it away from him, like a lion tamer.

Dirk worked methodically for what felt like ages, until his shoulders ached from swinging his sword. The longer he hacked uselessly, the angrier he got, and all he could do was harness the anger into doing more damage to the monster.

Something hard and solid smashed into Dirk’s side, just below his ribcage. He stumbled sideways and fell to his knees, catching himself with a hand on the clay floor. His chest constricted and he gasped for air, his breath completely gone. For a sick, dizzy moment he thought that he’d run into the wall, or that it had broken loose from the earth to run into him—but no, the monster was moving sideways like a crab, deliberately trying to get Dirk out from underneath its ghostly skeleton.

Clutching his side, Dirk scrambled to his feet as it side-stepped again, its huge leg rushing toward him like a white tree trunk. He stumbled forward a few steps and then whipped around and grabbed the thing’s leg as it glided by, wrapping his arms around both lower leg bones in the most sincere bro-hug possible. It yanked him off his feet instantly, and he took the opportunity to wrap his legs around it too. He jammed his sword into the hinge between the lower bones and the femur and began to saw viciously. It was probably doing more damage to his sword than the monster, but he didn’t give a shit. He hoped it hurt.

His side definitely hurt, his nervous system waking up to the pain after the initial shock. The throbbing was tight and concentrated in a hot patch on his side. He’d had worse, but it lent him a grim determination as he tried to make some kind of dent in the bone. He hung on as the creature moved its leg, hissing again.

The next swing of its leg was much more violent, making Dirk’s stomach swoop as he clung desperately with every limb but his sword arm. It had definitely noticed Dirk now and was actively trying to shake him off with big, clumsy jerking motions. Dirk unequipped his sword and wrapped his other arm tight around the tibia. The thing’s bones were smooth and it was hard to find purchase—Dirk abruptly felt himself slipping down and scrambled upward, wedging his hand into the indent at the knee joint where he’d placed his sword. The pain in his side had dulled to a quiet ache and the promise of a nasty bruise.

This was no longer productive; he needed to climb down and find a new angle from which to attack, but right now if he loosened his grip at all he’d be sent flying. His head was starting to hurt from being jerked back and forth, and his thighs burned from hanging on.

And then something unbalanced—it shook a little harder, or Dirk lost a little focus, he wasn’t sure—something shifted, and Dirk felt the entire situation slip. Felt _himself_ slip, his hand suddenly scrabbling for purchase on the thing’s knee joint, his other arm sliding helplessly against the frictionless length of bone—and then it shook him free, and he was flying.

His back hit the hard-packed clay wall with a smack, his head slamming back hard. Fuck, that was just what he needed right now. He slid unceremoniously to the floor and tried to struggle to his feet again instantly, unsure what the thing was going to do next. But his legs buckled under him and he crumpled to the ground again, his shoulder blades tingling from the impact. At least he could see Jake better now. Jake smashed the monster across the nose with the butt of his pistol, and followed it with a shot from his other hand. He was bleeding from one shoulder, Dirk noticed muzzily—when did that happen? He noted abstractly that his vision was clouding over, his head starting to pound like the deepest bass beat. Jake was probably fine, probably handling it—it all seemed very far away just at the moment. Dirk pulled his knees up to his chest and fit his head between them, gasping in a pathetic attempt to take deep breaths to calm his body down.

He stayed there, eyes squeezed shut and heart hammering violently in his chest, until he heard the unmistakable soft pitter-patter of grist waterfalling to the ground. Jake did it. A sudden surge of affection wrapped tight around his chest, almost strangling him.

Dirk raised his head slowly, distantly noticing the head rush as he straightened. He cracked his eyes open in time to see the pile of grist before Jake methodically collected it. It was even smaller than the pile they’d found in the cavern. Dirk fucking hated this game almost as much as he loved Jake right now.

An instant later Jake was by his side, a hand on the back of his head.

“Jesus shitting Christ, Dirk, you okay?” he said, all earnest concern. Dirk couldn’t handle this right now. If only he’d just passed out.

“Yeah,” he said, pushing Jake’s hand away from him. “It’s no big deal. Not like I’ve never been concussed before.”

“Don’t even tell me about concussions, bucko!” Jake said. “After you and Jane and Roxy, head injuries are practically my fourth-best friend!”

“You’re bleeding,” Dirk said.

“That fucking waster got me. Not my proudest moment as an adventurer or as a man.” Dirk could see fang marks clearly now on Jake’s shoulder. The one that wasn’t tattooed, he was vaguely gratified to see. _Some kind of fucking man_ , AR added helpfully, flickering back to life. _And don’t read that last couple of words the way I know you just did. You’re tragically predictable, bro._

 _Please just do me a fuckin’ favor for once in your ephemeral glasses-bound existence and stop_ , Dirk thought at him, already feeling the start of the headache he knew was coming.

Jake’s eyes were bright, his breath still rapid, and he looked even more thrilled than he had after their strife earlier. Jake was a fucking full-blown adrenaline addict, and he was loving this—probably loving getting to take care of Dirk almost as much as the fight. He cupped the curve of Dirk’s skull with his hand again, and this time Dirk let him.

“We’ll get that head of yours sorted out, bro,” Jake said, laughing brightly. “Probably could have used a good knock, actually.”

“Thanks, Jake, that really means a lot to me,” Dirk said, and reached up to grab a fistful of Jake’s hair. Jake huffed out a little excited breath, and then leaned forward and pressed his open mouth to Dirk’s, all sloppy relief and excitement.

Dirk felt his consciousness slipping again, falling back into the feeling that this was happening to someone else. He could hear his heart beating triple-time, and he quietly analyzed the sensations without really feeling them: Jake’s lips against his, Jake’s fingers on his scalp, and Jake’s other hand resting on his knee. Three points of contact—he imagined writing it down on a big mental flipchart, _three_ , so he could keep track of exactly how much Jake was touching him at all times. Maybe he could graph it later, find the equation, and—he crashed back into himself and jerked forward sharply, because _Jake was fucking kissing him._

He kissed back, tightening his hand roughly in Jake’s hair, his eyes sliding closed. His body was freaking out, heat rushing downwards to his dick as the pain throbbed insistently in his side and his head, everything on high alert. Every single particle of skin tuned into the same frequency, just wanting Jake to touch him everywhere. His mind was a rush of static, bleached out by shock and arousal, through which only one tiny thought managed to creep: that it was becoming a pattern for Jake to touch Dirk only after getting hurt.

He pushed it away, and tried to physically push harder against Jake’s mouth, his teeth pressing into Jake’s lower lip until Jake made a tiny noise and pushed back. Fuck yeah. Dirk tugged on his hair savagely, pulling Jake in further between his knees. In response, Jake put a hand on Dirk’s shoulder and shoved him back.

Dirk’s head hit the ground with a faint twinge, okay, that probably wasn’t good, but he didn’t give a fuck because Jake was climbing onto him, his full squirmy weight pressing down on Dirk’s chest. His forearms rested on the ground on either side of Dirk’s head and he was kissing Dirk like the fucking kissing Prohibition was upon them. Jake wouldn’t know how to act shy if he was given lessons by Angelina fucking Jolie personally, and this was no different. He bit at Dirk’s lips and pushed his tongue into Dirk’s mouth with exactly the same brashness with which he shot at the skeleton monster. 

Dirk could not fucking take this. He was already hard. He could have gotten hard just from Jake touching his cheek, this was more than he’d ever asked for or expected and it was scaring him how his body and his heart just accepted it and wanted _more_. Jake was on top of him and he could fucking taste his mouth and it wasn’t _enough_. For years now, talking to Jake had felt like dragging his fingertips across sandpaper and this wasn’t doing shit to make it better. If anything it was worse right now, battery acid eating a hole into his chest as he wrapped his arms around Jake’s torso and tried to pull him even closer. There was nothing closer than full-body contact, he knew that, but there had to be because it wasn’t fucking working yet.

Jake shifted and wedged his leg in between Dirk’s thighs. The sirens going off in Dirk’s head kicked up another level—he couldn’t fucking _handle_ this, he wasn’t prepared for this, he had been living off scraps from Jake’s table for the past month and a half and Jake was giving him a banquet. He was aware that his lightheadedness was from the head injury at least as much as it was from the sloppy makeouts, but it all felt like one and the same. Like it was one hundred percent fucking normal that Jake kissing him made him feel like he was going to pass out or maybe die, or both. He rocked his hips up, feeling Jake’s thigh press into his erection through his spandex pants, and it stopped his breath short. He did it again, and Jake groaned and rocked down against him, something straight out of a trillion of Dirk’s most self-indulgent fantasies. He dug his fingers into Jake’s back, trying to hold onto something in the real world as the dizziness threatened to overtake him.

Jake sucked in a short, startled breath, and Dirk realized he’d grazed a stray fang mark on his shoulder blade. “Sorry,” he slurred against Jake’s mouth, but Jake just shook his head. He drew back a little, breaking the kiss, and buried his face in Dirk’s neck as he pushed his hips against Dirk’s again. Dirk tipped his head back, letting himself surrender to the feeling of Jake fucking English grinding against him. No, shit, no, he couldn’t even conceptualize it, it brought him close to panicking to think of this as some kind of grand culmination of all his pathetic fucking lonely teenage hopes. He had to reign himself in, narrow his focus to just how good it felt to have a warm body to hold and someone rubbing against his dick. The friction against his pants was a little painful, but Dirk didn’t really mind that, and besides, he was so turned on right now he would have humped a fence post.

He just had to focus on getting off, and not think about if Jake was ever going to want to do this again or if this was the only shot he was ever going to get. He wasn’t even sure which was worse—if this turned into a thing like the sporadic hugs, something Dirk couldn’t control or predict and just had to wait for Jake to gift him with, he didn’t think he’d survive.

To temper the uneasiness in his stomach he pushed Jake’s shirt up a little with one hand and dug his nails into Jake’s hip, pulling Jake roughly down against him again. Jake met him with enthusiasm, chuckling a little against Dirk’s throat—fucking _infuriating_ , what was _funny_ —and wiggling a hand between them to pluck at Dirk’s utility belt.

“This doggone thing hurts when you press up against it, you know,” Jake said, and Dirk groaned.

“Can you please refrain from using words like ‘doggone’ when we’re—” Dirk said and then stopped, unsure how to finish. His voice was a bit more breathless than he might have liked, but fuck that, he was concussed, it was allowed. Jake sat up, straddling Dirk’s hips and unbuckled his belt, sliding it off and placing it to the side. He leaned forward and removed Dirk’s shades as well. Dirk closed his eyes and watched the lights spin in circles behind his eyelids.

“Yeah, yeah, that old rusty tune,” Jake said, and then Dirk felt his hands pulling down the waistband of Dirk’s skintight black pants. His eyes snapped open, and for several unsteady seconds he fought off another head rush.

“Shit, Jake—”

“Shh,” Jake said. “I don’t fucking care what cantankerous objection you have to my colorful and evocative manner of expressing what’s in the old noggin!”

Dirk groaned again. Jake pressed the heel of his hand against Dirk’s naked dick, and Dirk clutched at the outsides of Jake’s thighs. It was hard to remember not to get too invested when Jake was talking about his noggin while they were—whatever. It was—it was actually better than anything Dirk had ever fantasized about, because somehow his imagination could never quite—get Jake, could never render him in perfect living detail, but here he was, just as awful and frustrating as always, and he was shimmying his shorts down and Dirk was intimately fucking familiar with the shape of Jake’s dick underneath them. He felt like he was falling backwards off a cliff, like something hard and crushing was rushing up to meet him at any second. This was going to go wrong, somehow, and Dirk wanted Jake to kiss him again so badly, he felt like a junkie. He was all crunched up inside like a trash compactor and it fucking hurt.

Jake dove back down again, his dick sliding up against Dirk’s as he slipped his tongue back into Dirk’s mouth, and Dirk’s insides twisted one notch tighter. He pulled at the back of Jake’s shirt, not even sure what he was trying to do, just desperate to regain a little control over the situation. Jake was working his hips enthusiastically, and DIrk was too fucking turned on. He could feel the orgasm building already, and he tried to tamp it down but it was hard when Jake was panting into his mouth. Lights were still bursting behind his eyes, and he kept fading in and out—one second he was all there, cataloguing every inch of Jake’s hot skin he could feel, and the next second he was about fifteen feet away from his body, the entire planet was spinning around him like a turbine and he was clutching Jake’s shirt to hold on.

“Jesus,” he muttered, breaking the kiss and tipping his head back again. He opened his eyes, trying to stay on this side of reality, wanting to soak in every second of what was happening. Jake’s dick was warm and slightly damp, not enough to make the slide frictionless but way better than rubbing up against fabric. Every movement was a hot shock, making it hard to tell what was real and what was the head injury.

He was done, he was so fucking done. “God, Jake,” he said, and shoved his hands up the back of Jake’s shirt, pressing them flat against the warm skin. He didn’t want it to be over, he wanted to pull back and push forward all at once—he just wanted _more_ , whatever more was, however he could get Jake closer to him and more _his_. It scared him, the depth of want in him, the sheer yawning abyss of his need for Jake—and he knew, down to every single bone in his tense body, that Jake didn’t—that he _couldn’t_ feel this way, that he didn’t have the capacity. This was all Dirk, this inability to just get off with a hot guy without needing Jake to promise never to pull back. This was one hundred percent Dirk Strider’s personal fucking problem. He screwed up his face, the blood pounding in his ears as his hips jerked upwards and he came.

His hips continued to move weakly against Jake’s as he came down, feeling like his insides had been scraped out of him with a spoon. He was still getting tingly aftershocks, but he could feel the headache descending on him dully, and the sweat pooled in the curve of his back was making him shiver.

Jake pulled away from him a little, propping himself up with one hand as he jerked himself roughly. It only took a few seconds before he hit his own climax, coming on Dirk’s stomach. 

Dirk thought maybe Jake would collapse on top of him, then, that he would get a chance to lie around with Jake, maybe tangle a few fingers in his hair as they recovered together. But instead Jake let out a deep exhale and climbed off Dirk, sitting back on his heels next to Dirk on the clay floor.

“Whew,” he said, running a hand through his hair. “Wish I’d thought to captchalogue Kleenex!”

Dirk’s head was really starting to throb, and he pressed a hand to his forehead as he sat up. Jake was looking down at the blood on his shirt like he’d just noticed it.

“Jeepers creepers, we’re a certified mess,” he said, and Dirk felt one more muffled pang, one last pick at the scab deep in him that never seemed to fully heal over. He suddenly felt awful, sick and compromised.

“Fuck,” he said softly.

“You okay there, bro?” Jake said. He’d taken off his shirt now and he was poking at his wounds. He drew his finger away from his shoulder, looking mystified at the sight of blood on it.

“Yeah,” Dirk lied. He reached for his shades and slid them on, flicking on the AR.

He sat there for a moment, the little virtual cursor flashing expectantly at him in the little virtual chatbox. _Okay_ , Dirk thought, _so you’ve got humanity on lock. Catalogued the entire fucking human condition with all its quirks and foibles and closed it up in your digital strongbox like the world’s most miserly hoarder. The fuck do I do now?_

 _You can’t do shit_ , AR told him, smugness oozing from the text. _That’s the fun part._


End file.
